The Land of Milk and Honey: An American TL
- Thread starter TheMann
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What a horrific dystopia this has become.
The record in gold medal games is 3-1 in Canada's favor and that's a dystopia? Lol.
Canada is still statistically the best in the world at hockey, just there are more great players out there now from lots of other places. I'm gonna try to take this one to the year 2100, see if I can write future history worth a poop. Any suggestions or ideas?
Genetic Therapy to improve the human body? Maybe soldiers would be able to receive gene therapy for improved strength and stamina? Stronger United Nations?
That one's being worked on already.
Maybe, but I'm not sure where to go with that beyond improving its institutions.
Perhaps the UN could gain a more permanent military force? The Peacekeepers only consist of voluntary troop contributions to UN-approved operations as opposed to a genuine standing body of its own. If it possible the UN could make members make mandatory contributions for direct funding and military assets for the UN Peacekeepers. The Peacekeepers would have its own military hierarchy, standardized training, and could only be deployed by Security Council resolution.
I've thought about that, but I'm not sure if the nations involved would like to have a permanent UN military force, particularly since there are several armed forces in this world (Canada most of all, India, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom and South Africa as well) which are very regular and enthusiastic supporters of peacekeeping operations and who have both the equipment, support and logistical capacity for it.
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The World Gets Smaller
By 2050, the massive changes of the modern world were being joined by a new reality, brought about by both climate change and technological advancement - the idea that the world was going to run out of resources of any sort was getting less and less real, particularly as human spacefaring (both by governments and private interests) was swelling every day.
Planetary Resources' quest to mine in the stars finally came to fruition in 2047, when the company brought back its first load of resources from its chosen asteroid in 95 Amaterasu. The sending out of probes had been small fish compared to what had been needed beyond that. The company had assembled a space station, Avatar Base, using mostly Bigelow Aerospace-built components to allow the spacecraft developed for the purpose to stay in orbit to avoid the problems of flying back and forth from Earth. The base had been designed as a junction point from which spacecraft would be sent out, and the three resource-carrying craft and the remote mining gear that was tied to it went out along with a fuel load, but machines aboard the spacecraft had used water aboard the asteroid to gather the fuel needed to return to the space station. (This was sufficient for a few runs, but soon one of the spacecraft had been tasked to the gathering of ice for fuel, which was subsequently stored at the station.) Planetary Resources' station in orbit was based in geosynchronous orbit above the Atlantic Ocean, allowing for safe operations for spacecraft, and a pair of heavily-modified Falcon X3 spacecraft had been developed to both carry components to the space station and return resources. Four teams of highly-trained and educated fourteen employees rotated on and off the base, and the spacecraft were controlled from ground stations via the space station. The three spacecraft and their loads developed for the purpose were lifted to the space station by heavily-modified Saturn V conventional rockets equipped with boosters, and lighter loads came via a quintet of modified Enterprise spacecraft via ISS-4 space station, which had seen these same spacecraft craft haul liquid hydrogen and oxygen up for the craft to use. The three star-faring craft had been designed to go from the asteroid being mined to the space stations, where the Enterprises that supplied them would return recovered materials home. It amounted to the setting up of a logistics system in space, but the effort (and vast sums of money) involved proved worth it when the first load of platinum, gold and rare earth metals touched down at the Mojave Spaceport in the California Spaceport on March 11, 2047. The huge costs involved in mining these resources didn't dampen anyone's spirits, though, as the 95 Amaterasu find proved to be beyond the expectations of even its investors.
The knowledge that a sizable stream of rare earth minerals would be coming to Earth from the stars caused several companies looking to move into the field to jump into it, growing the supply through space mining was a tempting thing for minerals that were rare on Earth. It was soon clear that several companies were going for this beyond Planetary Resources, accepting the huge costs involved in this operation for the vast payoff involved. It was the highest of high-risk ventures, but for five companies by 2055 - Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries, European Space Minerals, O'Neill-Lewis Industries and Asian Materials Corporation - it proved to be a highly lucrative business, providing vast funds for the companies which allowed the costs incurred to be paid off and allowing these firms to become major attractions for investors, namely for companies involved in the mining world, who sought to buy the minerals being returned from space themselves.
Beyond the 'Space Gold Rush' of the 2040s and 2050s, the world's climate change of the early 21st Century was proving to be a major benefit to the world in unexpected ways - while some countries saw drops in their agricultural output fall, many others - Canada, Russia, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, Argentina and Australia most of all - saw massive increases. The increased rainfall of the climate change world during the first decades of the 21st Century resulted in hundreds of endorheic basins filling in - the Caspian and Aral Seas (the latter reduced nearly to extinction in the 20th Century), Lake Eyre, Lake Chad, the Qattara Depression and the Great Salt Lake were among these, but it also resulted in many other basins becoming filled in. California's Mojave Region would by the end of the century be dotted with lakes as a result, one them filling in what had once been the lowest point on the North American continent in Death Valley, causing a dramatic shift in the local climate there over the course of the century. The overall result of the greater rainfall in many regions was an huge growth in agricultural production, which combined to see food prices for staple crops tumble during the 21st Century and causing a major shift in many portions of the developed world to more specialized crops. Fears of the collapse of multiple major currents proved to be for naught, and perennial crops multiplied the effect, something which also resulted in many cases in reductions in the use of chemical fertilizers. Lands where the soils had been exhausted from harder farming methods soon became home to orchards and tree crops in tens of thousands of cases, and more modern methods of agriculture proved to be able to feed far more people, with by the middle of the century the world's food production being far beyond was what was strictly necessary for the world's population. This resulting rainfall also resulted in the water concerns in many portions of the world disappearing, most notably in the densely-populated Indian subcontinent, while adding to the new water supplies created by the development of graphene desalinization.
In the United States, the tasks created by the creation of the new basins in the West were numerous. Beyond the monster job of moving Salt Late City and the areas around the Lake that would be submerged, the hundreds of dry lakes in the West that suddenly became very much wet lakes forced movements as well, namely to make sure roads (including Interstates 10, 15, 40 and 80), railways, airfields (including part of Edwards Air Force Base and the famed Area 51), power stations and residences weren't covered up by water level rises. The effort involved, however, wouldn't go wasted as the desert bloomed as the water level changed. By the middle of the century, the water levels in the desert had forced a pathway through the desert from the lakes of the Mojave Basin through the Bristol, Cadiz and Danby Lakes to the Colorado River, causing more changes still. The growth of the Salton Sea and the other lakes of the desert resulted in substantial changes in the climate, and the United States' environmental authorities would spend decades trying to ensure clean environments in these areas. Problems with scorpions and snakes would, however, be quite common in the decades to come in the desert regions of the West. It did, however, create a surplus of hydroelectric power in the West, both from the connection of the Utah Sea to the Columbia River system and the new rivers that ultimately resulted from the changes in the climate, a situation that also existed in parts of Canada and most of Mexico, among other areas, and caused a sizable population growth in the American West as America's population sailed past 400 million in 2046 - Interstate 15 became a major corridor as communities from Los Angeles all the way to Salt Lake City grew in size - Barstow, California, for example, swelled from 23,500 people in 2015 to nearly 80,000 by 2050.
Beyond the climate changes, ever-better ways of recycling materials had swelled to the recovery of carbon, and by the 2030s most industrial facilities didn't vent carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, as companies who wanted the CO2 for raw carbon would pay producers to use reservoirs and liquification systems to collect and liquify the carbon dioxide for transport. Cheap electric power in North America (which got cheaper still as nuclear fusion power stations began to appear not long after the first one in Ohio in 2040) resulted in a gradual move away from the use of natural gas for heating, which further reduced carbon emissions. Such was the fall in residential and industrial emissions (and some transportation ones, as electrified trains both cut away at the usage of both diesel-fueled counterparts and commuter airliners) gave new leases on life to the internal combustion engine, even as ever-improving electric cars cut away at their market share. By 2050, the world's carbon emissions (despite huge economic growth in the same time period) had been cut by almost 60% from 1990 levels, and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere began to level off, a welcome sigh of relief to scientists studying climate change. With the slowing of economic growth in the West, dozens of countries that hadn't the develop of the West spending their efforts to close the gap. The closing of the gaps made the world increasingly more a contest of equals, a fact that endeared to both internationalists (who liked the evenness and the ability for many peoples to compete on a more level playing field) and nationalists (who saw many nations able to challenge the affluent West in more fields) alike.
It was a time where once-mad ideas could become real, and it showed.
The European Union, formed by the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, was the template of what was to come. The EU had had its rocks along the road, but by the 2010s multiple rounds of difficulty with further political integration had ultimately put a major damper on that idea, with the EU seeking to a way of allowing Europe's states to use it to settle differences and make life for all of the nations among them. By 2040, the EU had swelled to include all but Norway, Switzerland and a handful of microstates among Europe all the way out to Ukraine, the Baltics, Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, Israel, Palestine and Lebanon. (Canada, Cape Verde and Russia aren't EU members but are observers of the union, though Russia is eligible for membership.) Brussels primarily in times uses its European Parliament to adjudicate disagreements and set up individual standards and agreements, effectively allowing all of its members to more easily chase their own agendas with Brussels acting as a wingman. This arrangement made life easier for the European nations to use agreements to get better deals with the world while retaining individual sovereignty - a system that was soon also copied by Mercosur in Latin America, the North American Nations in North America and African Union in Africa. This was followed by the Pacific Federation in 2044, which combined the ASEAN nations (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Taiwan, Cambodia, Laos, Papua New Guinea) with Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Japan further north, India and Bangladesh further West and Australia and New Zealand further south. (China, Brunei and Myanmar weren't allowed in because of authoritarianism, though all three were offered observer positions.) The Pacific Federation chose to not enact open borders but instead push for economic co-operation and common standards and policies. But among those standards was plans for power grid interconnectors, preferential trade access for raw materials (Australia REALLY wanted this) and finished goods (Japan, Korea and Taiwan leaned on this one), as well as everything from power grid interconnectors and transportation networks, the latter being important because of delays from shipping across the region. The move resulted in the approval in 2048 of the Korea-Taiwan Railroad Tunnel, which was completed in 2057 and opened in 2060, as well as increasing improvements to regional railway networks. Hydropower-rich Korea became a major supplier of electrical power to densely-populated Japan, while the Federation resulted in Australian raw materials and energy supplying much of the rest of Asia, with Japanese and Australian interests both developing the synthetic crude technology to provide their own energy supplies, a particular boon to resource-poor Japan which did, however, have substantial coal reserves. Indeed, the ability to export raw materials to the vast markets of Asia with few barriers (in minerals, energy, wool and cotton and foodstuffs most of all) in monumental quantities made Australia probably the richest nation in the world per capita by the middle of the 21st Century. Australia took full advantage of this by both lavishly subsidizing its own industrial sectors it wished to stay strong, but also using money and technology to close gaps - the vast empty deserts of Australia were ideal for space-based solar power projects, and Australia developed the best systems in the world for rural communications and transport to help close the vast distances. By the middle of the century, Perth's port cities of Kwinana and Fremantle were among the busiest in the world for loading minerals and food bound for India and Iran to the north as well as the markets of Asia.
Sensing that the Trans-Pacific journey was proving a tricky thing, Canadian National Railways and Russian Railways jointly in 2050 proposed the biggest railroad project in the world in a century or more, with the plan to be for CNR to build north from Prince George, British Columbia, across the Yukon and Alaska to Nome, Alaska, while the Russian Railways would build northeast from Yakutsk, Norilsk and Olekminsk to Lavrentiya and Uelen on the Bering Strait, and once political agreement was made, to cross the Bering Strait with a pair of parallel, heavily-reinforced cable-stayed bridges, carrying six train tracks (two high-speed passenger lines and four heavy freight lines) and a ten-lane covered highway across the bridge, the highway covered because of the extreme weather of that part of the world. Global warming had reduced one of the major problems (ice floes), and the design was done with the idea that the freight train tracks would have two tracks each at North American standard gauge and two at the wider Russian standards, with the whole works designed for huge loading gauge, allowing North American freight cars and containers to run directly into Russia with a change of bogies. As Russian Railways and Canadian National had been exchanging technical information since late Soviet times (Canadian involvement in the Trans-Siberian Railway went back to its original construction in the early years of the 20th Century) and the new lines would be built with wide carriages, North American-standard coupling and braking systems (the Russians had moved towards this system since the end of Soviet times) and 25kV / 60 Hz electrification, raising the idea of using dual-gauge tracks to allow each others' locomotives to be used as well.
The idea got major traction in both Russia and Canada, but required approval in the United States, which proved a little more tricky to get. Regardless, both Russian Railways and Canadian National Railways (followed by the Canadian Pacific and British Columbia Railway companies) began going north, aiming to be ready for what they figured would be good traffic out of Alaska and northern Russia and an avalanche off of the other continent. Both knew that there was a long distance difference between the ocean route and the train route, thus making the trip fast was important - and both companies aimed for a normal operating speed of 135 km/h on the route as a result, while the high-speed lines were planned to be built to standard gauge. Russia, to the surprise of many, was very much in favor of the idea, and Russian Railways even began making their freight cars with weights in pounds as well as kilograms and began the changeover to buckeye couplers and straight air brakes in anticipation of trains running through Alaska and Canada to the United States, and sent officials to classification yards and terminals in the United States and Canada to both learn their operational systems and maintenance routines and make sure the companies knew that their cars would be taken proper care of if and when they came to Russia. Several American railroad companies saw the Russian commitment and jumped on it, making trips to Moscow to work out co-operation agreements with their Russian counterparts. These highly-publicized points, along with the mineral resources that Siberia was known to contain (iron ore, nickel, coal, bauxite, gold, platinum-group metals and diopside, along with huge oil and natural gas reserves) and tour organizers talking of truly incredible train journeys along the route [1] was a major factor in turning public opinion.
In 2051, sensing that the project could be built and looking at the obvious, Moscow made an incredibly bold play of its own - they proposed a treaty that would completely eliminate all ballistic launchers with a range of more than 2500 kilometres, commenting on it that such a move would make the world safer simply because there could be no more launches of ballistic missiles that could cross the world in less than an hour. Russia pointed out that no nuclear-capable nation was lacking geopolitical clout and all had an interest in making the world a safer place, and pointing out that the nations which have long-ranged ICBMs and SLBMs were by that point debating the costs of renewing their nuclear weapons capability, also pointing out that everyone who had nuclear weapons had more than sufficient deep-strike capability to send these weapons deep into other nations. Russia went even further than this by unilaterally removing the last of the Borei class missile submarines from service, daring the nations who also had SSBNs to do the same. It was a sufficient shock that Brussels publicly supported the idea quickly, and Ottawa asked Washington to consider the idea as well. Such was the public support for the idea in Canada and Russia that Alaska salivated at the thought, and with the declining output of the North Slope oil deposits, the Alaskans publicly supported the project a matter of weeks after Russia's bold call. That done, Washington called a summit about it in Anchorage, and on May 25, 2052, the American President, Russian President and Canadian Prime Minister gave it the green light.
While train lines to Fairbanks and Magadan were built by 2053, getting across the Alaskan wilderness, as with the Russian approach across Chukotka, proved much more tricky. In both cases, icebreakers, including monstrous Canadian icebreakers John A. MacDonald and Wilfrid Laurier and Russian counterparts Arktika and Rossiya, busted through the idea to deliver goods the ports of Nome and Lavrentiya for construction, while roads went northwest from Fairbanks and northeast from Magadan, leading the railroads. The fact that this part of the world didn't see much sunlight for five months of the year was dealt with thanks to floodlights, while the nasty winters were dealt with through the use of the world's biggest snowblowers and plows. There was little concern for the environment during construction beyond the most obvious, but once the sections of the railroads were operational, environmental remediation was substantial. Lavrentiya and Nome both became boomtowns and supply stations, allowing both road construction and eventually railroad construction to come from two directions. The Russian side actually proved more difficult than the American and Canadian, as the railroad to Nome was finished in the summer of 2057, with the approach to the bridge site at Wales, Alaska, being completed during the winter. It took another year for the Russians to make it to Uelen. The bridge building which had begun from both sides was built steadily, with both ships and trains bringing in components that had been pre-assembled in other places, speeding up the job. Despite the monstrous cost of the effort, the bridge was completed in May 2064, with the line opening in its entirety, opened by the three national leaders involved on July 2, 2065.
With the 21st Century being marked by ever-greater movements of goods and people, the projections for demand across the Bering Strait link proved rather pessimistic, as big as they were. Within months of the opening of the line, the huge four-track line was pushing capacity, and the terminals at Lavrentiya and Nulato were much too small. Eventually, the dual-gauge track and terminals were stretched to Magadan to Fairbanks, and the British Columbia and Alaska Railways began the building of a parallel line to the original Alaska Railway. Huge freight traffic was soon followed by luxurious passenger trains across the crossing, carrying tens of thousands of passengers on tourist trips. The crossing gave new life to Russia's vast Far East regions and gave it new reason to establish better transport links - and the crossing's tracks also resulted in branches from the Bering Strait Mainline down the Kamchatka Peninsula to Petropavlovsk. Locals soon figured out that tourists were intrigued by the vast, seemingly untamed landscape and began considerable efforts to make the regions more accommodating to visitors - and many of these efforts bore fruit. Indeed, hunting in Siberia would be a common wealthy man's challenge in the later years of the 21st Century. Traveling by train for luxury purposes had become a major industry in the 21st Century - both trains operated by government-owned firms (like Amtrak's American President, Via Rail's Canadian, South African Railways' Blue Train and Australian National's The Ghan) and privately-operated trains (the Orient Express, Pride of Africa, Queen of the Orient, Rocky Mountaineer, Royal Scotsman, Emerald Isle and Western Experience had had loyal followings for decades) had been well known for years, but with the ability to travel to five of the six continents by rail, the market got even bigger, particularly as many of these trains tended to take advantage of the best routes for scenery which were, in plenty of cases, not the best for freight traffic.
Asia reacted to a suddenly-closer North America with a major shift in trade. Japan dusted off its plans for a railroad tunnel between Hokkaido and Sakhalin, and when it was clear that the Bering Strait Crossing would be built, Japan and Russia worked out a plan to build and railroad tunnel under the La Perouse Strait and rebuild the train tracks of the Sakhalin Railway for dual-gauge operations to allow Japanese freight trains to reach clear across Sakhalin to a new bridge and a change-of-gauge terminal at Lazarev, which would then take trains to the Bering Strait mainline. Korea did the same, though in this case their plan was through the tracks of the former North Korean Railways to Khasan on the Tumen River. Everyone involved built their capacities as big as they could, and everyone made sure their rail cars could easily enough exchange bogies. Within months, Korail had introduced into service North American-style double-stack container cars and 33-vehicle capacity three-unit autoracks for shipping cars to North America. Japan would do a lot to continue the trans-pacific ocean routes, but Korea and China would do a lot to ship goods to North America by rail.
As the world got smaller thanks to trains, travel in cities got quicker all the time as well. The first maglev train lines in the world, built in Seoul in Korea, Tokyo in Japan, New York City in the United States and Berlin in Germany in the early 2000s (the New York City maglev route had been built in time for the 2012 Olympics there) spread from there in cities where there was route and demand for it during the first half of the 21st Century. Atlanta, Seattle, Toronto, Montreal, Paris, Barcelona, Tel Aviv, Tehran, Johannesburg, Melbourne, Shanghai, Singapore and Osaka all built such systems early in the 21st Century, operating at speeds at anywhere from 100 km/h to as high as 250 km/h. JR Central's ambitious attempt at building a Tokyo-Nagoya maglev line in the first decades of the 21st Century ultimately bankrupted the firm and forced JR Central back into government hands, which largely slowed the building of maglev lines - their huge electricity consumption also played a part in this, even as they became common for express commuter operations. The Boeing 2707, introduced in 2004, had been the start of a trend that, while it had taken a while, was bearing fruit by 2030 as Airbus and a Bombardier/Embraer consortium had developed supersonic aircraft of their own in the Airbus A500 and the Bombardier/Embraer SA700, which both proved to be every bit the equal of Boeing's swing-wing brute. While supersonics would never prove popular for over-land routes - noise concerns were unavoidable, even as design improvements reduced sonic boom concerns - they would come to dominate many over-water routes during the 21st Century, the aircraft's speed being more than valuable enough to compensate for the stiff fuel economy penalty that supersonics paid for those speeds. The term "chasing the sunset" originally created by the fliers of the Concorde in the 1980s grew to be a popular term for travelers who made many trans-oceanic flights. Over land, Bombardier's revolutionary WA Series was soon a template for the Airbus A450 and MMD MD-16, which cruised just below the speed of sound to avoid the problems of sonic boom but still shave time off of flights, this being particularly useful on long-distance over-land routes (such as New York to Los Angeles).
[1] Among others being proposed was the Pacific Rim (Singapore-Bangkok-Hong Kong-Shanghai-Seoul-Tokyo-Vladivostok-Magadan-Fairbanks-Whitehorse-Prince George-Vancouver-Seattle-San Francisco-Los Angeles) and Superpower (Moscow-Yekaterinburg-Novosibirisk-Irkutsk-Magadan-Fairbanks-Prince George-Edmonton-Calgary-Winnipeg-Minneapolis-Chicago-Detroit-Pittsburgh-Philadelphia-Washington).
By 2050, the massive changes of the modern world were being joined by a new reality, brought about by both climate change and technological advancement - the idea that the world was going to run out of resources of any sort was getting less and less real, particularly as human spacefaring (both by governments and private interests) was swelling every day.
Planetary Resources' quest to mine in the stars finally came to fruition in 2047, when the company brought back its first load of resources from its chosen asteroid in 95 Amaterasu. The sending out of probes had been small fish compared to what had been needed beyond that. The company had assembled a space station, Avatar Base, using mostly Bigelow Aerospace-built components to allow the spacecraft developed for the purpose to stay in orbit to avoid the problems of flying back and forth from Earth. The base had been designed as a junction point from which spacecraft would be sent out, and the three resource-carrying craft and the remote mining gear that was tied to it went out along with a fuel load, but machines aboard the spacecraft had used water aboard the asteroid to gather the fuel needed to return to the space station. (This was sufficient for a few runs, but soon one of the spacecraft had been tasked to the gathering of ice for fuel, which was subsequently stored at the station.) Planetary Resources' station in orbit was based in geosynchronous orbit above the Atlantic Ocean, allowing for safe operations for spacecraft, and a pair of heavily-modified Falcon X3 spacecraft had been developed to both carry components to the space station and return resources. Four teams of highly-trained and educated fourteen employees rotated on and off the base, and the spacecraft were controlled from ground stations via the space station. The three spacecraft and their loads developed for the purpose were lifted to the space station by heavily-modified Saturn V conventional rockets equipped with boosters, and lighter loads came via a quintet of modified Enterprise spacecraft via ISS-4 space station, which had seen these same spacecraft craft haul liquid hydrogen and oxygen up for the craft to use. The three star-faring craft had been designed to go from the asteroid being mined to the space stations, where the Enterprises that supplied them would return recovered materials home. It amounted to the setting up of a logistics system in space, but the effort (and vast sums of money) involved proved worth it when the first load of platinum, gold and rare earth metals touched down at the Mojave Spaceport in the California Spaceport on March 11, 2047. The huge costs involved in mining these resources didn't dampen anyone's spirits, though, as the 95 Amaterasu find proved to be beyond the expectations of even its investors.
The knowledge that a sizable stream of rare earth minerals would be coming to Earth from the stars caused several companies looking to move into the field to jump into it, growing the supply through space mining was a tempting thing for minerals that were rare on Earth. It was soon clear that several companies were going for this beyond Planetary Resources, accepting the huge costs involved in this operation for the vast payoff involved. It was the highest of high-risk ventures, but for five companies by 2055 - Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries, European Space Minerals, O'Neill-Lewis Industries and Asian Materials Corporation - it proved to be a highly lucrative business, providing vast funds for the companies which allowed the costs incurred to be paid off and allowing these firms to become major attractions for investors, namely for companies involved in the mining world, who sought to buy the minerals being returned from space themselves.
Beyond the 'Space Gold Rush' of the 2040s and 2050s, the world's climate change of the early 21st Century was proving to be a major benefit to the world in unexpected ways - while some countries saw drops in their agricultural output fall, many others - Canada, Russia, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, Argentina and Australia most of all - saw massive increases. The increased rainfall of the climate change world during the first decades of the 21st Century resulted in hundreds of endorheic basins filling in - the Caspian and Aral Seas (the latter reduced nearly to extinction in the 20th Century), Lake Eyre, Lake Chad, the Qattara Depression and the Great Salt Lake were among these, but it also resulted in many other basins becoming filled in. California's Mojave Region would by the end of the century be dotted with lakes as a result, one them filling in what had once been the lowest point on the North American continent in Death Valley, causing a dramatic shift in the local climate there over the course of the century. The overall result of the greater rainfall in many regions was an huge growth in agricultural production, which combined to see food prices for staple crops tumble during the 21st Century and causing a major shift in many portions of the developed world to more specialized crops. Fears of the collapse of multiple major currents proved to be for naught, and perennial crops multiplied the effect, something which also resulted in many cases in reductions in the use of chemical fertilizers. Lands where the soils had been exhausted from harder farming methods soon became home to orchards and tree crops in tens of thousands of cases, and more modern methods of agriculture proved to be able to feed far more people, with by the middle of the century the world's food production being far beyond was what was strictly necessary for the world's population. This resulting rainfall also resulted in the water concerns in many portions of the world disappearing, most notably in the densely-populated Indian subcontinent, while adding to the new water supplies created by the development of graphene desalinization.
In the United States, the tasks created by the creation of the new basins in the West were numerous. Beyond the monster job of moving Salt Late City and the areas around the Lake that would be submerged, the hundreds of dry lakes in the West that suddenly became very much wet lakes forced movements as well, namely to make sure roads (including Interstates 10, 15, 40 and 80), railways, airfields (including part of Edwards Air Force Base and the famed Area 51), power stations and residences weren't covered up by water level rises. The effort involved, however, wouldn't go wasted as the desert bloomed as the water level changed. By the middle of the century, the water levels in the desert had forced a pathway through the desert from the lakes of the Mojave Basin through the Bristol, Cadiz and Danby Lakes to the Colorado River, causing more changes still. The growth of the Salton Sea and the other lakes of the desert resulted in substantial changes in the climate, and the United States' environmental authorities would spend decades trying to ensure clean environments in these areas. Problems with scorpions and snakes would, however, be quite common in the decades to come in the desert regions of the West. It did, however, create a surplus of hydroelectric power in the West, both from the connection of the Utah Sea to the Columbia River system and the new rivers that ultimately resulted from the changes in the climate, a situation that also existed in parts of Canada and most of Mexico, among other areas, and caused a sizable population growth in the American West as America's population sailed past 400 million in 2046 - Interstate 15 became a major corridor as communities from Los Angeles all the way to Salt Lake City grew in size - Barstow, California, for example, swelled from 23,500 people in 2015 to nearly 80,000 by 2050.
Beyond the climate changes, ever-better ways of recycling materials had swelled to the recovery of carbon, and by the 2030s most industrial facilities didn't vent carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, as companies who wanted the CO2 for raw carbon would pay producers to use reservoirs and liquification systems to collect and liquify the carbon dioxide for transport. Cheap electric power in North America (which got cheaper still as nuclear fusion power stations began to appear not long after the first one in Ohio in 2040) resulted in a gradual move away from the use of natural gas for heating, which further reduced carbon emissions. Such was the fall in residential and industrial emissions (and some transportation ones, as electrified trains both cut away at the usage of both diesel-fueled counterparts and commuter airliners) gave new leases on life to the internal combustion engine, even as ever-improving electric cars cut away at their market share. By 2050, the world's carbon emissions (despite huge economic growth in the same time period) had been cut by almost 60% from 1990 levels, and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere began to level off, a welcome sigh of relief to scientists studying climate change. With the slowing of economic growth in the West, dozens of countries that hadn't the develop of the West spending their efforts to close the gap. The closing of the gaps made the world increasingly more a contest of equals, a fact that endeared to both internationalists (who liked the evenness and the ability for many peoples to compete on a more level playing field) and nationalists (who saw many nations able to challenge the affluent West in more fields) alike.
It was a time where once-mad ideas could become real, and it showed.
The European Union, formed by the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, was the template of what was to come. The EU had had its rocks along the road, but by the 2010s multiple rounds of difficulty with further political integration had ultimately put a major damper on that idea, with the EU seeking to a way of allowing Europe's states to use it to settle differences and make life for all of the nations among them. By 2040, the EU had swelled to include all but Norway, Switzerland and a handful of microstates among Europe all the way out to Ukraine, the Baltics, Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, Israel, Palestine and Lebanon. (Canada, Cape Verde and Russia aren't EU members but are observers of the union, though Russia is eligible for membership.) Brussels primarily in times uses its European Parliament to adjudicate disagreements and set up individual standards and agreements, effectively allowing all of its members to more easily chase their own agendas with Brussels acting as a wingman. This arrangement made life easier for the European nations to use agreements to get better deals with the world while retaining individual sovereignty - a system that was soon also copied by Mercosur in Latin America, the North American Nations in North America and African Union in Africa. This was followed by the Pacific Federation in 2044, which combined the ASEAN nations (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Taiwan, Cambodia, Laos, Papua New Guinea) with Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Japan further north, India and Bangladesh further West and Australia and New Zealand further south. (China, Brunei and Myanmar weren't allowed in because of authoritarianism, though all three were offered observer positions.) The Pacific Federation chose to not enact open borders but instead push for economic co-operation and common standards and policies. But among those standards was plans for power grid interconnectors, preferential trade access for raw materials (Australia REALLY wanted this) and finished goods (Japan, Korea and Taiwan leaned on this one), as well as everything from power grid interconnectors and transportation networks, the latter being important because of delays from shipping across the region. The move resulted in the approval in 2048 of the Korea-Taiwan Railroad Tunnel, which was completed in 2057 and opened in 2060, as well as increasing improvements to regional railway networks. Hydropower-rich Korea became a major supplier of electrical power to densely-populated Japan, while the Federation resulted in Australian raw materials and energy supplying much of the rest of Asia, with Japanese and Australian interests both developing the synthetic crude technology to provide their own energy supplies, a particular boon to resource-poor Japan which did, however, have substantial coal reserves. Indeed, the ability to export raw materials to the vast markets of Asia with few barriers (in minerals, energy, wool and cotton and foodstuffs most of all) in monumental quantities made Australia probably the richest nation in the world per capita by the middle of the 21st Century. Australia took full advantage of this by both lavishly subsidizing its own industrial sectors it wished to stay strong, but also using money and technology to close gaps - the vast empty deserts of Australia were ideal for space-based solar power projects, and Australia developed the best systems in the world for rural communications and transport to help close the vast distances. By the middle of the century, Perth's port cities of Kwinana and Fremantle were among the busiest in the world for loading minerals and food bound for India and Iran to the north as well as the markets of Asia.
Sensing that the Trans-Pacific journey was proving a tricky thing, Canadian National Railways and Russian Railways jointly in 2050 proposed the biggest railroad project in the world in a century or more, with the plan to be for CNR to build north from Prince George, British Columbia, across the Yukon and Alaska to Nome, Alaska, while the Russian Railways would build northeast from Yakutsk, Norilsk and Olekminsk to Lavrentiya and Uelen on the Bering Strait, and once political agreement was made, to cross the Bering Strait with a pair of parallel, heavily-reinforced cable-stayed bridges, carrying six train tracks (two high-speed passenger lines and four heavy freight lines) and a ten-lane covered highway across the bridge, the highway covered because of the extreme weather of that part of the world. Global warming had reduced one of the major problems (ice floes), and the design was done with the idea that the freight train tracks would have two tracks each at North American standard gauge and two at the wider Russian standards, with the whole works designed for huge loading gauge, allowing North American freight cars and containers to run directly into Russia with a change of bogies. As Russian Railways and Canadian National had been exchanging technical information since late Soviet times (Canadian involvement in the Trans-Siberian Railway went back to its original construction in the early years of the 20th Century) and the new lines would be built with wide carriages, North American-standard coupling and braking systems (the Russians had moved towards this system since the end of Soviet times) and 25kV / 60 Hz electrification, raising the idea of using dual-gauge tracks to allow each others' locomotives to be used as well.
The idea got major traction in both Russia and Canada, but required approval in the United States, which proved a little more tricky to get. Regardless, both Russian Railways and Canadian National Railways (followed by the Canadian Pacific and British Columbia Railway companies) began going north, aiming to be ready for what they figured would be good traffic out of Alaska and northern Russia and an avalanche off of the other continent. Both knew that there was a long distance difference between the ocean route and the train route, thus making the trip fast was important - and both companies aimed for a normal operating speed of 135 km/h on the route as a result, while the high-speed lines were planned to be built to standard gauge. Russia, to the surprise of many, was very much in favor of the idea, and Russian Railways even began making their freight cars with weights in pounds as well as kilograms and began the changeover to buckeye couplers and straight air brakes in anticipation of trains running through Alaska and Canada to the United States, and sent officials to classification yards and terminals in the United States and Canada to both learn their operational systems and maintenance routines and make sure the companies knew that their cars would be taken proper care of if and when they came to Russia. Several American railroad companies saw the Russian commitment and jumped on it, making trips to Moscow to work out co-operation agreements with their Russian counterparts. These highly-publicized points, along with the mineral resources that Siberia was known to contain (iron ore, nickel, coal, bauxite, gold, platinum-group metals and diopside, along with huge oil and natural gas reserves) and tour organizers talking of truly incredible train journeys along the route [1] was a major factor in turning public opinion.
In 2051, sensing that the project could be built and looking at the obvious, Moscow made an incredibly bold play of its own - they proposed a treaty that would completely eliminate all ballistic launchers with a range of more than 2500 kilometres, commenting on it that such a move would make the world safer simply because there could be no more launches of ballistic missiles that could cross the world in less than an hour. Russia pointed out that no nuclear-capable nation was lacking geopolitical clout and all had an interest in making the world a safer place, and pointing out that the nations which have long-ranged ICBMs and SLBMs were by that point debating the costs of renewing their nuclear weapons capability, also pointing out that everyone who had nuclear weapons had more than sufficient deep-strike capability to send these weapons deep into other nations. Russia went even further than this by unilaterally removing the last of the Borei class missile submarines from service, daring the nations who also had SSBNs to do the same. It was a sufficient shock that Brussels publicly supported the idea quickly, and Ottawa asked Washington to consider the idea as well. Such was the public support for the idea in Canada and Russia that Alaska salivated at the thought, and with the declining output of the North Slope oil deposits, the Alaskans publicly supported the project a matter of weeks after Russia's bold call. That done, Washington called a summit about it in Anchorage, and on May 25, 2052, the American President, Russian President and Canadian Prime Minister gave it the green light.
While train lines to Fairbanks and Magadan were built by 2053, getting across the Alaskan wilderness, as with the Russian approach across Chukotka, proved much more tricky. In both cases, icebreakers, including monstrous Canadian icebreakers John A. MacDonald and Wilfrid Laurier and Russian counterparts Arktika and Rossiya, busted through the idea to deliver goods the ports of Nome and Lavrentiya for construction, while roads went northwest from Fairbanks and northeast from Magadan, leading the railroads. The fact that this part of the world didn't see much sunlight for five months of the year was dealt with thanks to floodlights, while the nasty winters were dealt with through the use of the world's biggest snowblowers and plows. There was little concern for the environment during construction beyond the most obvious, but once the sections of the railroads were operational, environmental remediation was substantial. Lavrentiya and Nome both became boomtowns and supply stations, allowing both road construction and eventually railroad construction to come from two directions. The Russian side actually proved more difficult than the American and Canadian, as the railroad to Nome was finished in the summer of 2057, with the approach to the bridge site at Wales, Alaska, being completed during the winter. It took another year for the Russians to make it to Uelen. The bridge building which had begun from both sides was built steadily, with both ships and trains bringing in components that had been pre-assembled in other places, speeding up the job. Despite the monstrous cost of the effort, the bridge was completed in May 2064, with the line opening in its entirety, opened by the three national leaders involved on July 2, 2065.
With the 21st Century being marked by ever-greater movements of goods and people, the projections for demand across the Bering Strait link proved rather pessimistic, as big as they were. Within months of the opening of the line, the huge four-track line was pushing capacity, and the terminals at Lavrentiya and Nulato were much too small. Eventually, the dual-gauge track and terminals were stretched to Magadan to Fairbanks, and the British Columbia and Alaska Railways began the building of a parallel line to the original Alaska Railway. Huge freight traffic was soon followed by luxurious passenger trains across the crossing, carrying tens of thousands of passengers on tourist trips. The crossing gave new life to Russia's vast Far East regions and gave it new reason to establish better transport links - and the crossing's tracks also resulted in branches from the Bering Strait Mainline down the Kamchatka Peninsula to Petropavlovsk. Locals soon figured out that tourists were intrigued by the vast, seemingly untamed landscape and began considerable efforts to make the regions more accommodating to visitors - and many of these efforts bore fruit. Indeed, hunting in Siberia would be a common wealthy man's challenge in the later years of the 21st Century. Traveling by train for luxury purposes had become a major industry in the 21st Century - both trains operated by government-owned firms (like Amtrak's American President, Via Rail's Canadian, South African Railways' Blue Train and Australian National's The Ghan) and privately-operated trains (the Orient Express, Pride of Africa, Queen of the Orient, Rocky Mountaineer, Royal Scotsman, Emerald Isle and Western Experience had had loyal followings for decades) had been well known for years, but with the ability to travel to five of the six continents by rail, the market got even bigger, particularly as many of these trains tended to take advantage of the best routes for scenery which were, in plenty of cases, not the best for freight traffic.
Asia reacted to a suddenly-closer North America with a major shift in trade. Japan dusted off its plans for a railroad tunnel between Hokkaido and Sakhalin, and when it was clear that the Bering Strait Crossing would be built, Japan and Russia worked out a plan to build and railroad tunnel under the La Perouse Strait and rebuild the train tracks of the Sakhalin Railway for dual-gauge operations to allow Japanese freight trains to reach clear across Sakhalin to a new bridge and a change-of-gauge terminal at Lazarev, which would then take trains to the Bering Strait mainline. Korea did the same, though in this case their plan was through the tracks of the former North Korean Railways to Khasan on the Tumen River. Everyone involved built their capacities as big as they could, and everyone made sure their rail cars could easily enough exchange bogies. Within months, Korail had introduced into service North American-style double-stack container cars and 33-vehicle capacity three-unit autoracks for shipping cars to North America. Japan would do a lot to continue the trans-pacific ocean routes, but Korea and China would do a lot to ship goods to North America by rail.
As the world got smaller thanks to trains, travel in cities got quicker all the time as well. The first maglev train lines in the world, built in Seoul in Korea, Tokyo in Japan, New York City in the United States and Berlin in Germany in the early 2000s (the New York City maglev route had been built in time for the 2012 Olympics there) spread from there in cities where there was route and demand for it during the first half of the 21st Century. Atlanta, Seattle, Toronto, Montreal, Paris, Barcelona, Tel Aviv, Tehran, Johannesburg, Melbourne, Shanghai, Singapore and Osaka all built such systems early in the 21st Century, operating at speeds at anywhere from 100 km/h to as high as 250 km/h. JR Central's ambitious attempt at building a Tokyo-Nagoya maglev line in the first decades of the 21st Century ultimately bankrupted the firm and forced JR Central back into government hands, which largely slowed the building of maglev lines - their huge electricity consumption also played a part in this, even as they became common for express commuter operations. The Boeing 2707, introduced in 2004, had been the start of a trend that, while it had taken a while, was bearing fruit by 2030 as Airbus and a Bombardier/Embraer consortium had developed supersonic aircraft of their own in the Airbus A500 and the Bombardier/Embraer SA700, which both proved to be every bit the equal of Boeing's swing-wing brute. While supersonics would never prove popular for over-land routes - noise concerns were unavoidable, even as design improvements reduced sonic boom concerns - they would come to dominate many over-water routes during the 21st Century, the aircraft's speed being more than valuable enough to compensate for the stiff fuel economy penalty that supersonics paid for those speeds. The term "chasing the sunset" originally created by the fliers of the Concorde in the 1980s grew to be a popular term for travelers who made many trans-oceanic flights. Over land, Bombardier's revolutionary WA Series was soon a template for the Airbus A450 and MMD MD-16, which cruised just below the speed of sound to avoid the problems of sonic boom but still shave time off of flights, this being particularly useful on long-distance over-land routes (such as New York to Los Angeles).
[1] Among others being proposed was the Pacific Rim (Singapore-Bangkok-Hong Kong-Shanghai-Seoul-Tokyo-Vladivostok-Magadan-Fairbanks-Whitehorse-Prince George-Vancouver-Seattle-San Francisco-Los Angeles) and Superpower (Moscow-Yekaterinburg-Novosibirisk-Irkutsk-Magadan-Fairbanks-Prince George-Edmonton-Calgary-Winnipeg-Minneapolis-Chicago-Detroit-Pittsburgh-Philadelphia-Washington).
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They sorta are. Here, the EU is much less of a sovereign state and more of an alliance body than anything else, but being a member of the EU has rather more rights and responsibilities than many alliances. It is indeed the template for such alliances around the world, but its teeth only can be bared when its member states allow it to be. However, prosperity and free movement of both capital and persons (requirements for membership) has over the decades created huge cross-cultural pollination, which when combined with greater prosperity for the majority of Europeans has largely buried OTL's Euroskepticism.
Thank You.
This world has seen so much industrial development that the CO2 dumped into the atmosphere caused a sizable crumbling of the Ferrel cells in the atmosphere, which the Hedley cells expanded into, effectively over the course of decades (starting from the late 1990s until the leveling off of CO2 levels in the late 2020s) pushing the monsoon latitudes rather some distance north, which when combined with the warmer surface temperatures and water temperatures that this results in causing greater evaporation from the oceans and bodies of water, causing both warmer temperatures across the areas and greater rainfall, effectively creating something similar to the Holocene Wet Phase. The effect of this is that belts of land north of the Tropic of Cancer and south of the Tropic of Capricorn suddenly get a lot wetter, and there are a lot of areas in those areas that are semi-arid of deserts - the deserts of the United States and Mexico, the northern Sahara and Mediterranean regions, the Arab Middle East and Iran, Central Asia, the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Australia, South Africa's Highveld, southern Brazil and most of Argentina - which see by the 2010s a lot more precipitation, and by the mid-2020s its pretty much accepted as a permanent situation, which does cause many problems in the shorter terms - the sudden re-appearance of many bodies of water that were at best seasonal, major flooding concerns in other places (particularly southern China, the Ganges River Basin and much of the Mississippi River system in the Untied States) and extreme weather that has both bigger strength and wider ranges - in the longer term its huge growth in agricultural output that can happen as a result is a sizable boon for humanity.
It is perhaps a little bit of an ASB scenario, but as its not at all scientifically impossible and gives me the ability to banish concerns about food supplies, I'm using it anyways.
The tallest structure in the world today is still the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, though the list of tall skyscrapers is a long one - while the 2,717-foot high point of this building is still the world's tallest, the list of supertall (1,000+ foot) towers is a very long one. OTL, there are 130 buildings built that are above that height and 76 under construction. ITTL, there are 241 such buildings, with another 135 under construction. IOTL, there are 17 such buildings in the United States, but ITTL there are 36 (51 if you look at North America, with 11 in Canada and four in Mexico). Part of the driver of this is image - ITTL, many companies like to show off their wealth and power with landmark structures that become associated with their names.
There is nothing like Sky City or anything of that nature on the drawing board, but it does have to be said that higher-density cities are common worldwide, particularly in cities which are either short of land due to high population density (pretty much every major city in Asia and several in Europe fall into this category, along with New York, Mexico City, Caracas and Sao Paulo), located in areas where difficult terrain (San Francisco, Vancouver, Seattle, Rio de Janiero, Cape Town, Sydney, Athens, Rome, Istanbul, Jerusalem) or economic conditions encourage centralization (London, Paris, Frankfurt, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Nairobi, Toronto, Chicago, Boston, Miami, Santiago). In modern times, even wide-spread sprawling cities (Los Angeles, Houston, Berlin, Melbourne, Buenos Aires, Tehran, Johannesburg) are going up out of wishes by many among the local population to be closer to the amenities of the center city. Most major cities have many buildings interconnected by underground or above-ground pathways (this is particularly true in countries like Canada, Russia and Australia where the local climate is more harsh).
The tallest buildings by region are the Burj Khalifa (Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2,717 ft, 160 floors, completed 2014) in the Middle East, the Tokyo Skytree (Tokyo, Japan, 2,080 ft, 29 floors, completed 2016) in Asia, One World Trade Center (New York City, United States, 2,001 ft, 125 floors, completed 2010) in North America, the Federation Tower (Moscow, Russia, 1,465 ft, 101 floors, completed 2021) in Europe, One Plaza Flamengo (Rio de Janiero, Brazil, 1,295 ft, 104 floors, completed 2023) in South America, Australia Centre (Melbourne, Australia, 1,194 ft, 102 floors, completed 2021) in Australia and the KwaDukuza eGoli Hotel South Tower (Johannesburg, South Africa, 1,095 ft, 91 floors, completed 2010) in Africa.
OTL (17):
- 4 Times Square (New York, NY)
- 432 Park Avenue (New York, NY)
- American Motors Tower (Chicago, IL) [1] - Tallest in Chicago and Midwest
- Aon Center (Chicago, IL)
- Bank of America Tower (New York, NY)
- Chrysler Building (New York, NY)
- Empire State Building (New York, NY)
- Four Seasons Hotel and Resort Chicago (Chicago, IL) [2]
- Franklin Center (Chicago, IL)
- JP Morgan Chase Center (Houston, TX)
- John Hancock Center (Chicago, IL)
- Library Tower (Los Angeles, CA)
- Nations Bank Plaza (Atlanta, GA)
- New York Times Building (New York, NY)
- One57 (New York, NY)
- Straosphere Las Vegas (Las Vegas, NV)
- Two Prudential Plaza (Chicago, IL)
OTL Under Construction as of 2016 (5):
- 53 West 53rd (New York, NY)
- Nordstrom Tower (New York, NY)
- One Pennsylvania Plaza (Philadelphia, PA) [3]
- Transbay Tower (San Francisco, CA)
- Wilshire Grand Center (Los Angeles, CA)
ITTL (19):
- 99 Hudson Plaza (Jersey City, NJ)
- 300 Biscayne (Miami, FL)
- Avatar Vision South Tower (Las Vegas, NV)
- Boeing Plaza (Seattle, WA)
- Boston Gardens West Tower (Boston, MA)
- Crown Las Vegas (Las Vegas, NV)
- Indiana Center (Indianapolis, IN)
- Latin America Business Center (Miami, FL)
- Miami Central One (Miami, FL)
- Michael J. Evans Center (Indianapolis, IN)
- Music City Landmark (Nashville, TN)
- Oceanwide Center (San Francisco, CA)
- One AT&T Plaza (Dallas, TX)
- Pacific Western Bank Plaza (Los Angeles, CA)
- Plaza of Los Angeles South Tower (Los Angeles, CA)
- Renaissance Center Tower One (Detroit, MI)
- Southern Pacific Plaza (San Francisco, CA)
- Tesla Tower (Los Angeles, CA)
- World Trade Center (New York, NY) [4, 5]
[1] This is the former Sears Tower, owned by American Motors since 1997
[2] The former Trump Chicago, sold along with Trump Toronto and Trump Vancouver to Four Seasons because of financial issues on the part of the developers
[3] This is the Comcast Center, but here Comcast is based in Detroit
[4] There are three supertalls in the World Trade Center, but they are here counted as one building
[5] One World Trade Center in New York in the United States' tallest building, at 1,776 feet to the roof, 1,789 feet to its observation deck and 2,001 feet including its two spires
All of these buildings are about 300 metres in height (the international definition of a 'supertall' building), but the United States is home to dozens of buildings just below this height threshold.
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Trump wasn't the developer of any of those buildings, the developers paid for the rights to the name. He's still a loser and a blowhard in this world mind you, but in this world his odds of being taken seriously as a politician are pretty much zero.
The Presidents of the United States in this world:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (D-New York) (32nd) March 4, 1933 - April 12, 1945 [1]
Harry S. Truman (D-Missouri) (33rd) April 12, 1945 - January 20, 1953
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (R-Kansas) (34th) January 20, 1953 - January 20, 1961
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) (35th) January 20, 1961 - November 22, 1963 [2]
Lyndon Baines Johnson (D-Texas) (36th) November 22, 1963 - January 20, 1969
Richard Milhous Nixon (R-California) (37th) January 20, 1969 - August 9, 1974 [3]
Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. (R-Michigan) (38th) August 9, 1974 - January 20, 1977
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter Jr. (D-Georgia) (39th) January 20, 1977 - January 20, 1981
Ronald Wilson Reagan (R) (40th-California) January 20, 1981 - January 20, 1985
Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy (D) (41st-Massachsetts) January 20, 1985 - January 20, 1993
Howard Henry Baker Jr. (R-Tennessee) (42nd) January 20, 1993 - January 20, 1997
William Jefferson Clinton (D-Arkansas) (43rd) January 20, 1997 - January 20, 2005
Paul David Wellstone (D-Minnesota) (44th) January 20, 2005 - January 20, 2013 [4]
Jon Meade Huntsman Jr. (R-Utah) (45th) January 20, 2013 - January 20, 2021 [5]
Barack Hussein Obama (D-Illinois) (46th) January 20, 2021 - January 20, 2029 [6]
Kirsten Elizabeth Rutnik Gillibrand (D-New York) (47th) January 20, 2029 - January 20, 2033 [7]
Robert Michael Kennison (R-Michigan) (48th) January 20, 2033 - January 20, 2041
Anahit Misak "Ana" Kasparian (D-California) (49th) January 20, 2041 - January 20, 2049
Connor David Joshua (R-Washington) (50th) January 20, 2049 - March 16, 2052 [8]
Kendrick William Hamilton Jr. (R-North Carolina) (51st) March 16, 2052 - January 20, 2057 [9]
Alejandro Ronaldo "Alex" Vasquez (R-Florida) (52nd) January 20, 2057 - January 20, 2061 [10]
Sarah Ammitai Davidson (D-Pennsylvania) (53rd) January 20, 2061 - January 20, 2069
[1] Died in office from a massive brain hemorrhage
[2] Assassinated
[3] Resigned from office to avoid prosecution for obstruction of justice
[4] First Jewish President of the United States
[5] First Mormon President of the United States
[6] First African-American President of the United States
[7] First Female President of the United States
[8] Died in office from a major heart attack, aged 59
[9] Declined to run for re-election because of health issues, died on August 22, 2058 from stomach and colon cancer
[10] First Hispanic-American President of the United States
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (D-New York) (32nd) March 4, 1933 - April 12, 1945 [1]
Harry S. Truman (D-Missouri) (33rd) April 12, 1945 - January 20, 1953
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (R-Kansas) (34th) January 20, 1953 - January 20, 1961
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) (35th) January 20, 1961 - November 22, 1963 [2]
Lyndon Baines Johnson (D-Texas) (36th) November 22, 1963 - January 20, 1969
Richard Milhous Nixon (R-California) (37th) January 20, 1969 - August 9, 1974 [3]
Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. (R-Michigan) (38th) August 9, 1974 - January 20, 1977
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter Jr. (D-Georgia) (39th) January 20, 1977 - January 20, 1981
Ronald Wilson Reagan (R) (40th-California) January 20, 1981 - January 20, 1985
Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy (D) (41st-Massachsetts) January 20, 1985 - January 20, 1993
Howard Henry Baker Jr. (R-Tennessee) (42nd) January 20, 1993 - January 20, 1997
William Jefferson Clinton (D-Arkansas) (43rd) January 20, 1997 - January 20, 2005
Paul David Wellstone (D-Minnesota) (44th) January 20, 2005 - January 20, 2013 [4]
Jon Meade Huntsman Jr. (R-Utah) (45th) January 20, 2013 - January 20, 2021 [5]
Barack Hussein Obama (D-Illinois) (46th) January 20, 2021 - January 20, 2029 [6]
Kirsten Elizabeth Rutnik Gillibrand (D-New York) (47th) January 20, 2029 - January 20, 2033 [7]
Robert Michael Kennison (R-Michigan) (48th) January 20, 2033 - January 20, 2041
Anahit Misak "Ana" Kasparian (D-California) (49th) January 20, 2041 - January 20, 2049
Connor David Joshua (R-Washington) (50th) January 20, 2049 - March 16, 2052 [8]
Kendrick William Hamilton Jr. (R-North Carolina) (51st) March 16, 2052 - January 20, 2057 [9]
Alejandro Ronaldo "Alex" Vasquez (R-Florida) (52nd) January 20, 2057 - January 20, 2061 [10]
Sarah Ammitai Davidson (D-Pennsylvania) (53rd) January 20, 2061 - January 20, 2069
[1] Died in office from a massive brain hemorrhage
[2] Assassinated
[3] Resigned from office to avoid prosecution for obstruction of justice
[4] First Jewish President of the United States
[5] First Mormon President of the United States
[6] First African-American President of the United States
[7] First Female President of the United States
[8] Died in office from a major heart attack, aged 59
[9] Declined to run for re-election because of health issues, died on August 22, 2058 from stomach and colon cancer
[10] First Hispanic-American President of the United States
By the way, in this timeline--thanks to wide availability of very safe molten-salt reactors fueled by commonly-available thorium-232, cruise ships have gotten a combination of bigger--and faster. Indeed, the current record-holder for the fastest Atlantic crossing--the ship that took the Blue Riband trophy from the sadly-scrapped SS United States--is the NS America, which went from New York City to Southhampton at an incredible speed of 47.7 knots in 2040 (the ship makes regular Atlantic crossing at an average speed of around 40 knots anyway). Indeed, MSR-powered container ships are now crossing the oceans at speeds approaching 30 knots for some classes of ship.
But the most amazing way to move cargo around--especially for high-priority palletized cargo--was the Boeing Model 2010 Pelican, which became operational in 2020 "flying" (if that's the right term to use!) in wing in ground effect (WIG) mode between Tokyo Narita Airport and Los Angeles (and a short while later between Shanghai Pudong Airport and Los Angeles). Carrying nearly 2,000 metric tons of cargo, the Pelican became very popular with package express companies, since they could fly non-stop between Tokyo/Shanghai and Los Angeles. The Pelican later started flying transatlantic routes, flying from a special terminal at Long Island MacArthur Airport all the way to a new cargo terminal at Le Harve Octeville Airport.
But the most amazing way to move cargo around--especially for high-priority palletized cargo--was the Boeing Model 2010 Pelican, which became operational in 2020 "flying" (if that's the right term to use!) in wing in ground effect (WIG) mode between Tokyo Narita Airport and Los Angeles (and a short while later between Shanghai Pudong Airport and Los Angeles). Carrying nearly 2,000 metric tons of cargo, the Pelican became very popular with package express companies, since they could fly non-stop between Tokyo/Shanghai and Los Angeles. The Pelican later started flying transatlantic routes, flying from a special terminal at Long Island MacArthur Airport all the way to a new cargo terminal at Le Harve Octeville Airport.
- Status